Coconuts, Corporations: On Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao – lareviewofbooks

TALLYING THE VARIOUS uses of the coconut, the 20th-century agriculturist Frederic Rosengarten Jr. writes that [e]very part of the crop can be utilized for some human need. Citing the amount of protein found in one coconuts meat, the versatility of its shell and coir, and the approximate amount of lumber provided by the trunk of its tree, Rosengarten concludes that [o]ne could live almost endlessly on the coconuts products. Here, Rosengarten unwittingly tethers the long history of human-led environmental extraction to the fantasy of living forever on natures endless bounty a fantasy that, as our current environmental crisis makes clear, is antithetical to global, unbounded projects like monocropping, mineral-mining, logging, and drilling. In Vauhini Varas The Immortal King Rao, these realities confront each other, doing so by zeroing in on one resource: the coconut.

Athena, the 17-year-old narrator of Varas debut novel, rehearses the contents of Rosengartens book as she describes the childhood of her father, the titular King Rao. King Raos memories, as well as the text of Rosengartens The Book of Edible Nuts, arrive to Athenas conscious mind via an experimental technology called the Harmonica, an injectable solution that fuses the recipients brain to the internet itself, permitting Athena to seamlessly search for, condense, and save information from the web into the elastic expanse of her own mind. Yet, as Varas novel reveals in its early chapters, Athenas Harmonica has also been granted access to the entirety of her fathers memories. As the aged King Rao empties the contents of his life into his daughters consciousness, he also creates the conditions for Varas sprawling, intergenerational epic, which begins on the Rao coconut plantation in rural Kothapalli, India. Imprisoned for a crime that she did not commit, Athena is tasked with relaying not only the circumstances that led to her arrest, but also those that engendered her fathers rise to wealth, prominence, and, eventually, the restructuring of governmental order. The story of how she came into the hands of the police is not an isolated event; it is part of the larger story of her fathers emigration and his role in engineering the very government now holding her captive. Athenas plea for freedom thus entails not only a retelling of her fathers life and deeds, but also forcibly reliving his memories alongside her own.

The Immortal King Rao begins in an era of peak privatization: government first the US, then the rest of the world has been replaced by a Board of Directors. With the aid of a deific Algorithm, the Board governs its Shareholders (formerly citizens) by endowing them with Social Capital, a metric that stands in for both financial status and general social value. As society swells to its technological and capitalistic limits, so, too, does the ecological catastrophe known as Hothouse Earth. This social overhaul was borne of Kings first invention, a personal computer he called the Coconut. Inspired by the crops endless utility and aided by his wife Margarets keen instinct for business, Kings string of inventions (including the all-knowing Algorithm itself) quickly transcend their status as popular consumer goods; instead, they become the fabric of the worlds economy, sociality, and governance.

In this sense, the supposedly immortal King Rao does live almost endlessly on the coconuts products. As Athena narrates Kings rise to wealth and power, she also covertly reveals how much Kings reverence for his familial crop is entangled in a web of enterprise and environmental destruction. Varas novel, which gestures toward a number of tropes in contemporary speculative fiction technologys increasing imbrication in our social and political lives, the rise of unfettered corporatization, our careening movement toward environmental apocalypse places these consequences on a timeline that begins with a coconut plantation in Southeast India. The farming of coconuts, an enterprise that is emblematic of the deep history of imperial extraction and globalization, sits at the heart of Varas exploration of technology and capital.

Raised by her father on his isolated estate on Bainbridge Island, Athena grows up surrounded by Southeast Indian vegetation: Vara writes, None of the plants on the Raos twenty gorgeous acres of gardens were native to the Pacific Northwest; they were all tropical flora, guava and coconut trees, multicolored flowers that practically spurted from their stems, wax-like. On the harbor cruise tours that circle Bainbridge Island permitting tourists to raise their binoculars in the direction of the famous estate the tour guides quiz their passengers as to how such a feat could be possible in the rainy, cold environs of the Pacific Northwest. The correct answer forecasts one central theme in The Immortal King Rao, which is the fraught relationship between technological innovation and environmental destruction:

More often than not, some home-and-garden aficionado on board would have the answer. King and Margaret Raos secretive, private research organization, the Rao Project, had been commissioned to come up with genetically modified seeds that produced tropical trees and plants capable of growing in cooler climates like Seattles. The group was also working on inserting edible vaccines into tropical fruit eaten by the worlds poor and creating climate-adaptive produces that could withstand rising temperatures.

Recounting one of Kings memories, Athena narrates a scene from his first year as CEO of the Shareholder Government during which King convened a global consortium of experts to examine how science could be deployed to return the climate to historically normal conditions. The march toward Hothouse Earth, however, was already well underway, and the experts presented their report: nothing could be done to rewind the clocks on environmental destruction or, put more bluntly, you couldnt refreeze the Arctic. Disbelieving, Margaret leans in: were these experts really suggesting that humans had exhausted their potential for innovation that if something hadnt been invented yet, it never would be? While his wife remains bent on pursuing technological solutions to climate change, King changes tack. He begins inventing the Harmonica in earnest, describing it as humanitys only chance of having a future. With Hothouse Earth coming, King reasons, we needed to think about how to preserve some record of who we were. It is telling that Kings final accomplishment is only the preservation of who he was, enabling Vara to metonymically telegraph the insistent anthropocentrism that gave rise to Hothouse Earth in the first place.

Kings instinct to create a perfect record of his life is reminiscent of real-life billionaires immortality pursuits think Larry Pages interest in solving death or Elon Musks neurotechnology company Neuralink. Vara, who has worked for years as a technology correspondent for publications like The Wall Street Journal, was undoubtedly influenced by the increasing affinity between techno-billionaires and the hunt for immortality. The source of Kings wealth also resembles many a tech cofounder: The Coconut Corporations whole business was built on extracting and profiting from its users personal information, while claiming its goal was to bring people together in harmony. It is perhaps too easy to replace the phrase users personal information with natural resources here, though Varas scathing critique of the tech sphere also reminds us that what counts as a resource is as relentlessly mineable as the resources themselves.

Yet The Immortal King Rao charts a narrative whereby both King and Athena find themselves on the outer edges of the society that the Coconut Corporation helped to build. King undergoes a highly publicized fall from grace, whereas Athena finds herself aiding the Exes, a radical group that lives literally off the Algorithms grid. Moving back and forth between Kings childhood, his rise to prominence, and Athenas present, The Immortal King Rao meditates on the complex culpability of individual actors within wide and pernicious systems. The intricate, global nature of the plot only serves to underscore its core conceit: an endemic hunger for innovation is the through-line between early plantation economies and an utterly privatized world. At the end of this historical continuum is an unlivable but not unrecognizable world. The novel imagines a world where a descendent of Dalit coconut farmers finds himself at the height of technological and global power and where his daughter finds herself living in an anarchist commune bent on the destruction of everything her father built.

As such, The Immortal King Rao is not a neat allegory of environmental racism or the corrupting influence of power. However, it nevertheless insists that we pay attention to relationships between seemingly diverse commodities (coconuts on the one hand, computers on the other), and how difficult it is to wrench them from systems bent on extracting their value. Moreover, Vara adeptly threads her story with a complicated and never saccharine story of love; between father and daughter, husband and wife, and, significantly, a coalition of renegades who dream that another kind of life is possible. At just under 400 pages, The Immortal King Raos expansive reach might feel a little constrained by its length. Or, perhaps, it deftly mirrors the turbulence of its narrators mind. Athena, after all, isnt only faced with the task of digesting her fathers entire conscious experience she is up against a history of extraction so wide-reaching that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. But this is the story that, from her prison cell, she has to try her best to tell, in hopes that it might lead to her (and, maybe, humanitys) salvation.

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Coconuts, Corporations: On Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao - lareviewofbooks